This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
If the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been around in the days of Noah, things would have been different. Folks would have had at least an extra two months to stew and fret over the coming flood. That was the advantage Rock Islanders had in 1965. By then, the Corps of Engineers had been stationed on Rock Island for 99 years.
While there was little they could do to stop the relentless floods along the Upper Mississippi, experience had made them experts in predicting the timing, seriousness, and duration of those floods. They had learned how to read the signs.
By March of 1965, all the signs were bad, as if nature’s army was preparing an all-out assault on all fronts. Heavy rains the previous fall across the entire Mississippi drainage basin had soaked the ground so that the winter snow cover lay on top. Snow that winter was especially heavy. Prolonged, deep cold prevented the snow from melting. The wide stretch of Mississippi known as Lake Pepin experienced the coldest March on record—the temperature never rising above 30 degrees. The ice cover at Lake Pepin was 20 miles long, three miles wide, and up to 40 inches deep. Ice jams here and elsewhere along the river only added to the flooding as April rains arrived.
Based on all these statistics, the engineers predicted the largest flood in history for Rock Island. We watched and waited along the levees, taking in the spring air as the crest of the flood rolled down the Mississippi, past Red Wing, Minnesota on April 19th, Easter Sunday. Past Winona, Minnesota, two days later, flooding water supplies, storage tanks, generating plants, and thousands of homes. On and on past Lansing and Cassville, past Dubuque, Clinton, and finally, on April 28th, at 22.48 feet, past the flooded Quad Cities surrounding Rock Island. By the time the crest past St. Louis on May 8th, 40,000 people had been flooded out of their homes.
Many people blame the Corps of Engineers for the flood, but there was little they could do except to change our experience of the flood from an Agatha Christie mystery in which all is revealed only in a surprising last chapter, into a Greek tragedy whose heavy plot follows its fated course toward an end already known. Just think of the engineers as a Greek chorus.
Rock Island Lines is underwritten by the Illinois Humanities Council and Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, with additional funding from Humanities Iowa, the Iowa Arts Council, and Augustana College, Rock Island.
